One piece of malware caused an animated grey-haired man wearing tinted shades to walk across your monitor. Another scrambled your screen, reducing it to a jumble of letters and numbers in a rainbow of colours.

Those viruses are part of a large online collection of malware managed by the Internet Archive, where visitors can see screenshots of antique viruses in action or safely play with emulators to see how they worked on computers running MS-DOS.

More than 150,000 people have visited the Malware Museum website since it went live on Feb. 5, the collection’s co-curator Jason Scott said. He wasn’t surprised that the virtual exhibits have piqued so many people’s interest.

“A lot of these viruses represent historical and cultural forces that were parts of our early computing lives,” he said.

Defanged, the viruses are now as harmless as dinosaur bones in the Royal Ontario Museum.

Most come from the private collection of Mikko Hypponen, a cyber security expert in Finland, who has been preserving virus specimens for 25 years.

In the early days of computing, he came across one or two new viruses in a busy week, but now his firm, F-Secure, records hundreds of thousands of new samples every day, he said.

Although his job is to cure computers of viruses, he appreciates the older ones’ originality and 8-bit beauty.

“You could call it an art form,” he said in an interview. “These early virus-writers were expressing themselves with animations and sounds.”

The vast majority of viruses today are sneakier and much more malicious than their predecessors, Hyponnen said. Many are designed to steal credit card numbers or personal information.

“Today, if your virus makes the news, you’ve failed.”

But pioneering virus makers wanted to get caught. They lived for the gotcha moment when a user finds out their computer has been infected, said Ken Johnson, a cyber security researcher at FireEye in California, unaffiliated with the Malware Museum.

“It was more about showing off and calling it a day. Now it’s almost all monetary,” he said.

Vintage viruses could be destructive, annoying or playful – and sometimes all three.

One of Hypponen’s favourite viruses, Casino, asked the user to play a virtual game of slots, nicknamed Disk Destroyer.

Win and your files were safe. But lose five times and the virus mercilessly trashed all your stuff.

Early virus coders wanted to have a little mischievous fun while expressing themselves, Hypponen said.

In a 1997 interview on VX Heaven, a site which provides information on computer viruses, the virus coder Spanska said one of his goals was “to show that viruses can be used as a way to communicate something. Like graffitis (sic) on city walls, a way of expression between message and art.”

In an era before the Internet became mainstream, the challenge was to see how far a virus could travel usually via infected floppy disks.

For Hypponen, the malware collection is more than just a virtual museum of curiosities: it’s a record of an important episode in the history of computing.

“If we don’t act now to preserve this, no one else will,” he said.

Hypponen’s hits

Q Walker

This one is puzzling.

First, it shows a crude 8-bit pornographic image of a woman spreading her legs, and then at regular intervals a grey-haired man wearing shades and holding what appears to be a cane or lightsaber stomps across your screen.

“It’s probably very confusing for victims infected with the Walker virus,” Hyponnen said.

Marine

Don't be fooled by the friendly ship animation. This meant your hard drive was being destroyed

On June 5 and June 21, the Marine virus hides all files on your floppy disks, making them look empty, Hyponnen said.

When the machine is rebooted in July, “it shows the friendly ship animation while destroying the contents of your hard drive by overwriting random sectors,” Hyponnen said.

Q Frodo

This Lord of the Rings-inspired malware spreads via floppy disks only, and can keep your machine from booting.

“Frodo activates on September 22. It does this by writing the ‘FRODO LIVES’ graphic routine on the boot sector of your hard drive. This means that your machine will no longer be able to boot successfully.”

“Instead, it will always show the FRODO LIVES animation,” Hyponnen said.

Casino

The virus Casino asked the user to play a virtual game of slots. Win and you keep your files. Lose five times and everything was gone.

This virus spreads when you exchange program files on floppy disks, Hypponen said.

It activates on a specific date and asks the user to play a game of one-armed bandit. It overwrites your files and gives you five chances to win them back.

Get three British pound symbols in a row, and you win the jackpot and recover your files. If not, the system crashes and you lose everything.